He had already looked through the dead girl’s address book and appointment calendar, but he hadn’t found any listings for anybody named Cleary. There were a few names for people in Montana, which wasn’t either Ohio or Idaho or Iowa as the super had guessed, but these weren’t Clearys, and he didn’t plan on calling somebody in Montana just to find out if they were related to a dead black girl he didn’t want to tell them about in the first place. Her appointment calendar wasn’t much help either. She probably was new here in the city, which maybe explained why she had cappuccino all the time with the lady upstairs who taught piano. Ollie would have to give her a call. Night and Day, he thought And maybe Satisfaction, which was one of his favorite songs, too.
He went to the girl’s dresser now, and opened the top drawer, looking for he didn’t know what, anything that would tell him something about either her or whoever had been with her on the night she died. There were cops who went by the book, canvassed the neighborhood first, asked Leroy and Luis, Carmen and Clarisse did they see anybody going in or out of the apartment, but up here in Zimbabwe West, nobody ever saw nothing if you were a cop. Anyway, he preferred getting to know the vic first, and then getting to know whoever knew her. Besides, Ollie liked dead people much better than he did most living ones. Dead people didn’t give you any trouble.
You went into a dead person’s apartment, you didn’t have to worry about farting or belching. Also, if the vic was a girl, you could handle her panties or panty hose-like he was doing now-without anybody thinking you were some kind of pervert. Ollie sniffed the crotch of a pair of red panties, which was actually good police work because it would tell him was the girl a clean person or somebody who just dropped panties she had worn right back in the drawer without rinsing them out. They smelled fresh and clean.
Being in her apartment, sniffing her panties, going through the rest of her underwear, and her sweaters and her blouses and her high-heeled shoes in the closet, and her coats and dresses, one of them a blue Monica Lewinsky dress, going through all her personal belongings, trying to find something, wondering what kind of person could have stabbed the girl it looked like half a dozen times and then left a fuckin bread knife sticking out of her chest, opening her handbag and rummaging through the personal girl things in it, he felt both privileged and inviolate, like an invisible burglar.
Carl Blaney was weighing a liver when Ollie got downtown at four o’clock that Wednesday afternoon. It was still raining, though not as hard as it had been earlier. The morgue and the rain outside both had the same stainless steel hue. He watched as Blaney transferred the liver from the scale to a stainless steel pan. Personally, Ollie found body parts disgusting.
“Is that hers?” he asked.
“Whose?” Blaney said.
“The vic’s.”
“That’s all we’ve got here is vics.”
“Althea Cleary. The little colored girl got stabbed.”
“Oh, that one.”
“What do you do here, you just go from one liver to another?”
“Yep, that’s all we do here,” Blaney said dryly.
“So what’ve you got for me?” Ollie asked.
There was nothing Meyer liked better than to irritate Fat Ollie Weeks. The man was calling to talk to Carella, but Carella was down the hall. Meyer could not resist the temptation.
“Do you plan to sue this guy?” he asked.
“What guy is that?” Ollie asked.
He had never sued anybody in his entire life. He figured the lawyers of the world were rich enough.
“This guy who wrote this book with a lot of police stuff in it.”
“What guy?” Ollie asked again.
“This Irishman who wrote a book. You’re famous now, Ollie.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ollie said.
“On the other hand, it does say in the front of the book that the names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.”
“Wonderful,” Ollie said. “Tell Steve I called, okay? I got to see him about something.”
“‘Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons is entirely coincidental,’” Meyer quoted. “Is what it says. So I guess it is just a coincidence.”
“What is just a coincidence?” Ollie asked.
“His name being so similar to yours and all,” Meyer explained.
“Whose name?”
“This guy.”
“What guy?” Ollie asked for the third fuckin time.
“This guy in this police novel written by this Irish journalist.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Ollie said.
“Fat Ollie Watts,” Meyer said, drawing the name out grandly. “Not that anyone ever calls you Fat Ollie,” he added at once.
“They better not” Ollie said. “What do you mean, Fat Ollie Watts?”
“Is the name of a character in this book.”
“A character! Fat Ollie Watts?’ “Yeah. But he’s just a minor character.”
“A minor character?”
“Yeah, some kind of cheap thief.”
“Some kind of cheap thief!”
“Yeah.”
“Called Fat Ollie Watts!”
“Yeah. Pretty close, don’t you think?”
“Close? It’s right on the fuckin nose!”
“Well, no. Watts isn’t Weeks.”
“It ain’t, huh?”
